The big story

It’s a story playing on loop from Guwahati to Allahabad, Delhi to Meghalaya. The plot line is more or less the same: Teenagers in love. He’s 18, 19, or maybe 20. She’s 17 or 16. Everything is going smoothly until her parents find out. Perhaps she gets pregnant. Perhaps someone sees them together. Perhaps she’s run off with him. But all hell breaks loose. Maybe he’s of a different religion or caste, or maybe they’re just angry at the daughter’s exercise of choice.

They file a complaint of rape.

In 2014, when his 17-year-old daughter ran off with the 19-year-old man she loved, her father filed a missing person’s complaint with the police. The police tracked her down to Ghaziabad where she told them she had married her boyfriend in a temple. No matter. He was charged with rape and sentenced to seven years in prison by a trial court. He appealed.

Eleven years later, in February this year, Justice Jasmeet Singh of the Delhi high court finally acquitted him. The punishment handed out to him was a ‘perversity of justice’, the judge ruled. “It was a case of adolescent love and the physical relations were established consensually.”

By law, the age of consent is 18. In other words, sex with a girl who is less than 18 years of age, even if consensual, amounts to statutory rape.

The government’s own data, the National Family Health Survey-5 found that 39% of girls had sex for the first time before turning 18. This of course would include girls married off by their parents before the legal age. The survey doesn’t tell us of marital status, but it shows a large proportion of sexually active girls below the age of 18.

For 80 years, the age of consent was 16. Then in 2012, it was raised, without explanation or rationale, to 18 under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO).........

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